Thoughts – Page 12 – Femdom Resource

Can’t get no respect

Miss Pearl has written some wise words on when it’s appropriate to block and ignore a submissive. Her post is primarily targeted at dommes communicating online and the warning signs they should look out for. However, it strikes me that the underlying sentiment behind most of her points applies to all genders and kinky persuasions, and both lifestyle and professional.

For example, any pro-domme who immediately emphasizes her dominant role or my submissive one in our initial communication is a red flag for me. Similarly, if she can’t be bothered to pay attention to what I’ve written, doesn’t respect my time, or if she appears to be stereotyping me into some pre-defined submissive roles, then those are also troubling signs. I’ve never yet had a good experience where I got a bad initial feeling, but went ahead with it anyway.

I believe one of the key themes here is mutual respect. That’s respect for each other as a person and individual, not simply a D or an s or any other letter of the alphabet. It’s respect for each others time and energy. Respect for personal safety and the social situation. A lot of the issues I’ve seen have flowed from a lack of respect on one side or the other.

Of course showing someone respect doesn’t also mean you can’t do terribly evil things to them. Like make them sleep on the floor, naked, hooded and in chains and chastity. That’s cruel, but she’ll still respect him in the morning.

This is of course from the English Mansion site, and I believe the sleeping beauty is Mistress Sidonia. I originally found the image on the Alternative Femdom tumblr.

Ethical erotica

I was amused when I first spotted this image. I couldn’t tell if I should file it under CFNM or WTF. I was less amused when I discovered it was shot by the Reality Kings site. Their parent company is D&E Media, which owns a bunch of porn sites. Unfortunately their reputation in the industry is less than stellar. They have a bad reputation with performers, and have been accused of using under age actresses. The one decisions Belle Knox (the Duke student who made the news for starring in porn) said that she’d take back was shooting for one of their sites. While there’s nothing definitively proven one way or another, I’d certainly feel uncomfortable sending any of my dollars in their direction.

It reminded me me of this old post from Eros Blog on researching the background of the porn you buy. Femdom material is particularly easy in that respect, as there are so many independent women producing it. Just off my blogroll I can point to the wonderful Mistress T, the English Mansion of Mistress Sidonia, Lady Annisa’s Medial Fetish clips and the Femme Fatale Films of Mistress Eleise de Lacy. All these producers write about their work and lives, as well as offer great femdom material. There’s also a huge number of independent pro-dommes offering clips for sale. For example – Irene Boss, Cybill Troy, Goddess Cheyenne and Elena De Luca. It’s easy to find testimonials from submissives who have played with and shot for these dommes.

I’m not suggesting that before reblogging a tumblr image you need the life story of all the models, technical crew and the guy who made them coffee. But if you’re going to buy porn (and it doesn’t get magically created for free), then why not send the money to the people you know are creating it ethically and conscientiously? They’re not hard to find in the femdom genre.

I originally found this image on the Beautiful CFNM tumblr.

Do It Yourself

I’m always fascinated by the pornographic imagery people create for themselves. I don’t mean the kind involving naked volunteers and cameras, although that can be fun. I mean images that people modify via tools like photoshop to make them better reflect their fantasies.

This isn’t because the end results are particularly impressive. Most of the time it’s exactly the opposite and the manipulation is quite crude. What I like is what they say about peoples fantasies. They speak to the strength of their desires and the very specific fantasies that exist. Despite the vast amount of erotic imagery out there, people still feel the need to create fairly obviously manipulated images that push their internal hot buttons. They can look past the visual glitches and still get off on them. I think they’re great examples of both the creative urge, and the breadth and depth of our sexual desires.

The image below is one of the better examples of the genre. It looked a little off to me from the moment I spotted it, but I still liked the idea and clever way it had been composed. Particularly neat is the hairbrush on the chair. If you look at the original the hairbrush is a new addition.

I originally found this on the Because You Are Mine tumblr.

Are you OK?

This is a cute and appealing work of art. It manages to be playful and still hit an emotional note. However, that’s not why I featured it. I picked it out because it makes an important point that rarely gets the attention it deserves. The web is full of sexy imagery and descriptions of people doing crazy kinky stuff. There’s an endless parade of people apparently enjoying whatever their partner chooses to throw at them. Sites like kink.com may feature pre and post session interviews, but I’ve yet to see a clip where someone stopped and re-negotiated the scene once it had started. Blogs like this one talk a lot about great scenes, a bit about abusive dysfunctional scenes, but very little about scenes that start with the best of intentions but end up reaching emotional or physical roadblocks.

The reality is that consent is a continuous process. It’s not a box to be ticked pre-scene. Playing with a partner is not a competitive sport, where the goal is to finish or to achieve some previously agreed level of kink. Something that starts well may unexpectedly twist and go sour on you. Even if the fantasy was hot, there’s no guarantee about the reality. I’m sure most submissives have been in this situation where something isn’t right, yet we’re reluctant to stop and disappoint our partners. We act OK, kind-of, right up until we get that clear option to stop. Learning to spot the warning signs and then acting on them correctly is a skill both sides have to develop.

I’m not exactly sure who the artist is for this. The earliest tumblr posting I can find is this one, but I’m not clear if it was posted by the actual artist or not.

It’s all Greek to me

I’ve always hated the alpha v’s beta personality categorization. It seems so absurdly reductive. People normally have many different strands to their personality. Which ones emerge at any given time depends a lot on context, history and the specifics on a situation. It also leads to ridiculous generalizations where alpha or beta status is equated to things like financial success, education level or social skills.

A good example of that last kind of stupidity can be found in this article arguing that alpha women should marry beta men. It correctly states that the labels can be problematically stereotyped, and then a paragraph later equates alpha status to getting a graduate degree. It also suggests that to marry a beta is to marry beneath an alpha, and finishes by suggesting Meryl Streep and Don Gummer are an example alpha/beta pair. Presumably being a talented actress somehow makes you an alpha while being a successful sculpture is only beta material. I hadn’t realized artistic fields were also categorized this way.

The labels often pop up in D/s discussions, either to conform to the stereotype (alpha as dominant), or to contrast to it. Stabbity has a post talking about that latter type – the submissives who assert their alpha status. I’ve some follow-up thoughts on her post, but I’ll save them for tomorrow. Until then I’ll leave you with an image of a happy couple. Is this an alpha woman with her perfect beta mate? Or is this an alpha submissive taking care of his mistress before heading off to shout at minions while managing his hedge fund? Or is the whole labeling concept a bunch of crap?

I found this via the On My Knees tumblr. I’m not sure where it’s from originally. It looks like a mainstream photograph rather than something explicitly kinky, but I’ve not tracked down a source.

Love v’s Sex (hot sweaty kinky glorious sex)

The Girl on the Net has an interesting guest post entitled ‘Choosing Love Over Kink.’ You can go read it for yourself, but the title is pretty self-explanatory. It’s written by someone who is clearly deeply kinky but has chosen to settle down with someone who isn’t.

My initial reaction was to think of all those bloggers, forum posters and Savage Love letter writers who are stuck in unsatisfying relationships with exactly this problem. It’s easy to point to examples where sexual incompatibility has destroyed relationships. Yet one has to be careful about observational bias (aka the Streetlight Effect). Unhappy people tend to be loud and vocal. Kinky people who have successfully suppressed their desires for the sake of a specific relationship are typically not going to be posting online about that fact. Perhaps the world is full of sexually incompatible people with great relationships based on other factors.

That said, I am one of life’s natural cynics, and find that unlikely. It’s true that all relationships involve negotiation and nobody gets exactly what they want. Unimportant things can be discarded while important things can be compromised. Unfortunately, sex is an incredibly important thing, and there’s no compromise involved in this story. In fact, if you’re fundamentally sexually mismatched, I’m not sure compromise is even possible. It’s also my observation that points of tension in a relationship don’t become less important over time. They’re the bit of grit that rolls around jamming up the works.

Of course as a single guy who has never been married, perhaps I should keep my observations to myself. I’m not exactly the go-to expert here. While I ponder that depressing thought, I’ll leave you with a scene of domestic bliss. Hopefully this gentleman’s idea of sexual compatibility involved nipple clamps and ironing.

I’m afraid I don’t have an original source for the image. I found it on the Seductive Domme tumblr.

Chilly willy

Last month I ranted on the topic of limits and avoiding them. I didn’t intend that rant to turn into a monthly occurrence but, as luck would have it, I do have a new topic to address – chilly dungeons. It’s not quite as serious an issue, but what use is a blog if you can’t have a good rant now and again?

Admittedly a cold dungeon is probably more realistic. I doubt that medieval castles had much in the way of underfloor heating or goose down duvets for their prisoners. Yet oddly enough, when I’m naked and being carefully tied to a spanking bench by an attractive lady dressed in leather and heels, historical accuracy isn’t high on my list of requirements.

You might also think that a masochist would enjoy the extra torment of a freezing space. Or that it might help distract from the actual pain being inflicted. Yet oddly enough, I find it makes it much harder to deal with intense play. Everything is more snappy and stingy when it’s cold. Skin is more sensitive, and it’s hard to get into the right head space when being distracted by shivering body parts. I want to relax and soak into the pain, not spend my time wondering how warm the straight jacket hanging in the corner would be.

In the handful of times I’ve encountered this problem, it has never been the fault of the domme I was playing with. They’ve always been renting a space that was badly set-up, too cold to start with, and they couldn’t fix it in the time we had available. So if you’re reading this and you own a play space, my ask to you is either…

Design it as one or more small spaces that can be warmed up quickly and individually, or
Get enormous and efficient space heaters that can quickly warm up your large space, or
Have some way of dynamically partitioning up the space (e.g. heavy curtains) so that one area can be heated separately if necessary.

I think the perfect set-up is to have one large traditional playroom and then several smaller spaces that can be used if necessary. That’s what Lydia has and what I’ve seen in several other commercial spaces. Or I guess you could live in a hot region and play outside like these two. He might now have to worry about ants and spiders, but at least he’s warm.

This is Isis Love and Rok from a Men in Pain shoot. I found it on the Femdom Experience tumblr.

Pro Dommes of NY

The latest site that has been catching my eye is entitled ‘Pro Dommes of NY‘. As the name suggests, it’s a collection of images of professional dommes from New York, stretching back over the last couple of decades. I can’t say I care for it’s sub-title – “…from the icons & super-stars to the mediocre and has-beens.” That last couple of categories seems rude and unnecessary. Despite that, I find the site itself fascinating, although I’m not sure I can clearly say why.

I don’t visit New York that often, and I’ve only played there a handful of times, so this certainly isn’t a trip down memory lane for me. Some of the image and dommes are undoubtedly beautiful (see below), but the same could be said for the images on hundreds of current pro-domme sites spread across the web. I think it’s the element of time that makes it interesting for me. It makes me wonder about the person behind each shot: Where are they now? What do they think about it in hindsight? How did their career and life evolve? The images are public, deliberately revealing, and designed to advertise. Yet, what they advertised was a very private experience, and in many cases the character they’re advertising no longer exists, it has been retired by its creator.

We’re used to cleanly dividing the world into real and pretend parts. A bank manager is always real. Romeo and Juliet are pretend characters. An actor is sometimes real (accepting an award) and sometimes pretend (on the stage). I think pro-dommes blurs these boundaries in unusual ways, and each to different degrees. A session with one is both real (I have the welts to prove it) and pretend. Looking at this tumblr, and in particular the older images of ex-dommes, really brings that home to me.

This image is of Mistress Tess, a NYC pro-domme who is still very much active. Anytime I see a mainstream magazine article featuring a pro-domme they inevitably describe themselves a leading or top domme from wherever they hail from. While I’ve yet to have the pleasure of playing with Mistress Tess, from everything I’ve read about her, I think she’s one of the handful of New York dommes who could make that boast and be entirely truthful. If you’re New York based and would like to see her then check out her website.

Pink elephant syndrome

My mini-rant in the previous post triggered some interesting comments and some further thoughts of my own. So this post is a continuation on the topic of flirting with limits when playing with new (or newish) partners.

I should start by stating that none of the dommes that get regularly name checked here (Lydia, Yuki, Ai-Li, etc.) have ever been guilty of this problem. People I play with fairly often know my limits, so the situation doesn’t tend to arise, but even in my first few sessions with them they did the right thing and completely avoided problem areas.

I should also draw clear distinctions between the different circumstances where limits can get violated. The three obvious cases that spring to my mind are when a top deliberately cross a line, when a top simply doesn’t listen and is unaware of a limit, and when a top chooses to play somewhere close to a limit and crosses it accidentally. All of them are bad, but it was the final situations I was really trying to dig into, as it’s something I’ve not seen addressed elsewhere.

One of the comments (from ‘Informed guesswork’) likened it to the Pink Elephant problem. Being told not to picture a pink elephant instantly makes you picture one. In the same way I sometimes think limit discussions trigger the visualization and problem solving parts of a top’s brain…

Bottom: For me piercing / hoods / having bananas shoved up my bottom are limits.
Top: Oh really? (Thinking: That’s a shame I like needles / sensory deprivation / pretending to be a kinky gorilla)
Bottom: Yes. I am terrified of needles / am claustrophobic / witnessed a traumatic event at the local zoo as a child.
Top: OK. Good to know (Thinking: So is it all medical scenes / enclosed spaces / anal fruit situations that are a problem? What if I used a carrot? I remember a great scene I did last year with an aubergine. That’d be fun to try again…)

At this point the top now has pink elephants on the brain and is making connections to similar past situations, while forgetting the million and one other things she enjoys doing that don’t relate to elephants of any color at all.

Obviously the onus should be on the top to avoid this type of behavior, but one excellent suggestion in the comments was to finish a scene negotiation with the stuff you enjoy rather than personal limits. I suspect a lot of people are like me, and the last thing they talk about before a scene with a new person is their limits. After all, it’s human nature to open up with all the positive things you enjoy before adding the qualifiers and conditionals. Perhaps that switching that around would help avoid the pink elephants.

When looking for an image for this post I actually did an image search for elephants and femdom. I didn’t have much hope, but I should have realized that rule 34 can never be violated. Unfortunately the relevant images – of big breasted women waving whips near men being crushed by elephants – was a little too extreme for me to feature. So instead here’s a rather beautiful shot of a naked woman next to a naked elephant. It was taken by Vlad Gansovsky.

Perversity (of the wrong kind)

Most of my posts tend to the positive and upbeat. This one might be a bit more of a rant. Let’s put a nicer spin on it, and call it constructive feedback. It’s aimed squarely at dominants and centers on something that has happened to me too many times to be a coincidence.

Here’s my ~~rant~~ feedback: When you’re playing with someone fairly new, and that person has outlined a few limits (hard or soft) to stay away from, then stay the hell away from those limits. Don’t try and figure out exactly where the line is drawn. Don’t try and determine exactly what about the activity makes it a limit. Don’t toy with anything vaguely related. Just avoid, avoid, avoid.

I’m not a submissive with a lot of limits. When I look at a typical list of play activities, it’s quicker for me to list what I will not do rather than what I will. I’ve a soft limit with hoods and claustrophobia, I’ve a hard limit on humiliation, and I’ve a slightly screwed up lower back that makes extreme bondage positions tricky. That’s about it. Not a lot to remember. Yet multiple times in the last couple of years I’ve played with new dommes who, having been given this list, proceeded to flirt with activities that ran awfully close to these problem areas.

The last time it happened was a couple of months ago. It was my first time I’d played with this particular dominant. Not fifteen minutes into the session, and after my standard limits discussion, she pulled out a hood and asked if it’d be OK because it had both mouth and eye holes. Suddenly I’m thrown out of my happy subby mindset and into evaluation mode. How scary does it look? Can I handle it? Is it an integral part of the scene she wants to try? It would have been fine to show the hood pre-scene to get my opinion, but why bother suggesting it after we started to play? I ended up refusing and it made absolutely no difference to how the scene unfolded.

A similar thing happened towards the end of last year. It was again someone fairly new to me and, after mentioning my screwy back, she proceeded to try for a really awkward bondage position. She had me on my back on the floor, knees pulled up towards my shoulders and my arms pulled down towards where my feet would normally be. After pointing out that this wasn’t a great position for me she gave up on the plan, but it seemed so unnecessary to attempt it at all. Maybe we could have got it to work given time, but I estimate there are around three million and seven safe positions to tie me into, so why try for the tricky number three million and eight?

None of the examples (and I have multiple others) felt like deliberate attempts to break a boundary. It just seemed the limits discussion planted ideas, and that saying “Heavy X is a limit” somehow translated into “… but let’s do light X!”. This seems perverse to me, and not in the good way. Assessing intensity or risk is very hard with someone you don’t know. Much better to stay as far away as possible from potential minefields. Just because someone has handed you a map, doesn’t mean you need to go up to the minefield boundary and start jumping up and down. There’s no shortage of other interesting places to explore.

This artwork by Shohei Yamashiro manages to capture both hoods and an awkward position to bend a slave into. Now if you can just imagine she’s calling him a worthless fool, it’ll have nailed 3 of my personal limits.